The Michelle Diaries

Follow two students' adventures through medical school in this first installment. Their trials, their sorrow, their joy, their excitement and their loves. Share their journey to become the best they can be, no matter the obstacle. More

Follow two students' adventures through medical school in this first installment. Their trials, their sorrow, their joy, their excitement and their loves. Share their journey to become the best they can be, no matter the obstacle.

----

Diary #25

Yes, I keep a diary, or a journal as some call them, this is the twenty-fifth in my series, which I started when I first learned to write. I write this preface in all but the first. I am no writer I just jot down my feelings and experiences as they occur, I worry not about spelling or grammar, just the facts. One day I will let my daughter read these, if I have a daughter. Not so much to show her I was once young, but to show her life can be fun, full of excitement and wonder.

When Xavier was an adolescent, he devoured books in the science fiction genre. All types of science fiction. From the future military novels and shorts stories by David Drake, Andrew & William Keith and Keith Laumer, to the geopolitical novels of Mack Reynolds and Gordon R. Dickson, he liked them all. Fantasy stories on the other hand did not quite have an appeal for him in fact the only fantasy type series Xavier read were the Pern novels by Anne McCaffrey.

By far Xavier's favorite authors were Robert A. Heinlein, Gordon R. Dickson, Christopher Anvil and Fred Saberhagen. From Fred Saberhagen’s Berserker series to Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, he fell in love with military sci-fi. He also thoroughly enjoyed Gordon R. Dickson’s Dorsai series where the future of combat in the universe is in the hands of mercenaries.

Stories of cataclysmic destruction of the world we know today fascinated him also. Near future history sci-fi, post apocalyptic sci-fi. How the human spirit would cope dealing with a situation completely foreign to them.

Another aspect of sci-fi Xavier found fascinating was the prospect of time travel or inter-dimensional travel. What would happen if you suddenly found yourself in another time? What would you do? How would you react? What if…

Xavier first started writing in 1989, after finding himself laid off from his first full time job after graduating. During that time, he started three different novellas’, all of which have been lost due to a disk malfunction. After a long hiatus, he started again in late 2004. His first efforts were not up to his own standards for publication. Xavier has since reworked some of them and published them on web sites where they were well received. This has made him bold enough to attempt to publish via an eBooks publisher.